Not for sale.

On behalf of Design Academy Eindhoven, a very warm welcome to NOT FOR SALE. The place to freely explore and revalue the design — and what can and cannot be bought or sold — behind our complex, continuously evolving culture, amidst a typical Milanese urban setting.

After DAE’s high-profile #TVclerici during the 2017 Salone del Mobile, this year Design Academy Eindhoven is back in Milan with a unique spectacle that questions in vivo the various activities, implications and alternative definitions of design. What’s more, this bold mise en scene is fully embedded in the daily life on Milan’s Via Pietro Crespi.

Breakfast Talks

About the Breakfast Talks
The Breakfast Talks are an essential part of Design Academy Eindhoven’s exhibitions, where urgent issues surrounding design and its connection to the wider world can be foregrounded and investigated with a critical lens. In the framework of the Breakfast Talks, the designer is examined as a hybrid of a bellwether and a canary in the coal mine — in other words, as both an instrumental agent of social and material transformation and as a precarious figure at the avant-garde, immediately vulnerable to waves of financial, political, or technological upheaval.

In previous years, speakers have included Ilse Crawford, Max Fraser, and Justin McGuirk (2016), Marije Vogelzang and Julian Baggini (2015), Alexandra Midal, Jurgen Bey, and Dave Hakkens (2014), Paola Antonelli and Corinna Gardner (2013), Sissel Tolaas and Ravi Naidoo (2012), Cheick Diallo, Martí Guixé and Yves Béhar (2011), and more. In 2017, the Design Curating & Writing Master’s department also held a symposium on the role of the design institution.

Breakfast Talks at Not for sale.
This year, as part of the Design Academy Eindhoven exhibition Not for sale., the Breakfast Talks will touch upon a variety of subjects from the politics of objects to the designer’s relationship to material cycles, as well as the bridges that writing and curating build between design and the real world. The breakfast talks will be hosted in the former Osteria Crespi at Via Pietro Crespi, 14, transformed for the Salone into the Basic Income Café, a project by recent graduate Martina Huynh — which invites visitors to experience the economical principles behind two basic income scenarios, a complex system made tangible by means of the flow of coffee.

Wednesday, 18 April 2018, 10am — 11:30am
Hosted by Alice Twemlow, the head of the Design Curating & Writing master’s department at the Design Academy Eindhoven. This panel will focus on the theme of design writing and the range of formats that spread from social media to the printed page and back, from the independent magazine to the academy, from the streaming platform to the gossip column. How do technological and social conditions impact the way that design is described, debated, and redefined amidst a fluctuating and networked audience?

Thursday, 19 April 2018, 10am — 11:30am
Hosted by Formafantasma, mentors in the departments of Design and Well-being and Contextual Design at the Design Academy Eindhoven and designers of the recent Ore Streams for the National Gallery of Victoria Triennial. This panel will consider the designer’s role in making materials legible, workable, and safe to handle by a variety of people or machines — from miners and makers to users and recyclers and the robots of today and the near future. We will consider how design decisions, made in the seclusion of the studio or the abstraction of the digital modelling space, have wide-ranging repercussions that leave their mark on real world landscapes and social systems. Guests will include Aric Chen and Libby Sellers.

Friday, 20 April 2018, 10am — 11:30am
Hosted by Nadine Botha, an artist and design researcher, and one of the featured graduates in the exhibition Not for sale. This discussion revolves around the Politics of Stuff, departing from Botha’s award-winning project Politics of Shit, her multi-media research into the instrumentality of the portable flush toilet in Cape Town’s ongoing toilet wars. Politics of Stuff looks into the objects native to Via Crespi itself — from Lycamobile SIM cards to Miele washing machines — against the context of Salone del Mobile’s avant-garde or luxury design, asking how things influence and inform our reality in diverse ways.